AOL

AOL stands for "America OnLine", a leading commercial provider of email accounts and access to the internet. It merged with New York City based conglomerate Time Warner in 2001[1], and in the past few years, its business model has increasing shifted to an advertising-supported one, serving ads both on their own sites and to third-party sites via their Platform-A distribution system.

In 2009, Time Warner bought out Google's minority stake, and then AOL was spun off into a separate, publicly-traded company, initially owned by Time Warner's shareholders.[2] In 2011, it acquired[3] the liberal[4]Huffington Post. In 2015 Verizon announced that it would acquire AOL for $50 per share, or approximately $4.4 billion.[5]